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Of course, it could have been worse. The M101 mortar shells that litters Pohakuloa were actually designed to serve as a range-finders for the Davy Crocket mortar, which back in the late 1950s and the 1960s, and up until 1971 was designed to allow infantry troops to fire a small "tactical" nuclear mortar shell at targets just one to two miles distant. Some 700 of these 57-lb. "little nukes", which had a power of "just" several kilotons or less, were developed and actually made their way into the arsenals of troops in Europe and elsewhere during the Cold War. Fortunately there are no reports of any of them having been fired off at any of the military's firing ranges, although the test detonation of one in Nevada at an elevation of 40 feet above ground was the last case of open-air testing before JFK's open-air test moratorium went into effect--especially given that their radiation ipact radius was larger than their firing range, meaning that launching one was by definition an automatic suicide mission.
Then again, the Pentagon doesn't exactly have a sterling record about telling the truth where nuclear weapons and DU weapons are concerned. (You start to notice as you look into this stuff that with uranium weapons, the military's attitude towards troop safety is not a whole lot better than its attitude towards the people at the downrange end of the line.)
Nor is the NRC to be relied on to protect the American public. As an administrative judge wrote in a ruling on a case involving DU contamination at Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana, the NRC exhibited a "more than casual attitude with regard to decommissioning of sites on which radioactive materials remain as a potential threat to public health and safety and to the environment."
In another case, involving cleanup of the ShieldAlloy Metallurgical Corp.'s site in Newfield, NJ, where DU weapons were made, a judge said, "at the very least, the (NRC) staff has countenanced"a situation that will leave the citizens in the area surrounding the activity site in doubt for close to two decades regarding what measures will ultimately be taken for their protection."
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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